it happens
it happens once again
it happens
it happens once again
one more time

our movement in the dance of language

the bartender looks you in the eye
and hands you your favorite drink
you complain about work
he tells you about the girl he met last night
it's all strangely familiar
like the drink you hold

you've been here before
you've drunk this before
you've said this before
and you'll do it all again
it's on the tv set

satisfied by the instant
don't think about it
satisfied by the instant
don't think about it

Satisfied notes:

It was payday, and I was walking to the bank through the pouring rain. The light was red, and I waited, and as I waited, a cab pulled up to the curb and a man got out, umbrella first. A man coming out of the bank recognized him.

"Hey, Phil!" he said.

"Hi," Phil responded.

Lovely weather, I imagined him saying.

"Lovely weather," the man said.

Yeah, if you're a duck, I imagined Phil answering.

"Yeah, if you're a duck," Phil echoed.

I started thinking, then, about all sorts of things. Of the structure of language, of Pavlovian conditioned response, of call-response song structure and it's corrolary linguistic patterns, of behavior patterns defining set linguistic phrasings, and existing linguistic patterns defining behavior, and of institutional structures that reinforce these patterns, the games of meeting and greeting, of establishing pecking orders, of mating, of the feedback loop between the dominant culture and the mass media.

That night, after work, I walked into Doobies, my favorite bar. The bartender saw me coming in and had a shot of Jamison's waiting for me, and we proceeded to have the same conversation we had every time we were both there at the same time, always the same, always pretending it was new. And in that moment, it seemed that way.

I had started thinking about time defined not as the tick of the second hand across a clock, but in terms of an individual's experienced events (if I remember correctly, I'd been reading Henri Bergson about that time, and also Giles Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson). The problem, then, was that for some reason, we seem to fall into repetitive patterns which structure our lives and how we experience our lives, and that in turn dramatically influences (I'm taking one step back from saying "dictating") our behavior in any given situation, and that means that effectively, time loops for us, running us through what are essentially the same events over and over.

I don't think I successfully explained all these nuances in the song.

I think Dan put it most succinctly. "What the hell is this song about?"

"Recursive time," I said.

"Uh. Yeah. Whatever. Who wants a beer?"